Chicken Pot Pie

The best comfort food. Guaranteed to make your friends and family love you.

The chicken and the stock:

Make chicken stock. Pick the cooked chicken off the bone, tear into bite size pieces, and set aside. Strain the stock and set 2-3 cups aside. Save the rest for another use (freeze it if you can’t use it right away) and discard the bones and vegetables.

When you are ready to make the pot pie, preheat oven to 375 degrees.

The crust:

Make a single recipe of pie crust. While it is chilling, make the filling. You can substitute your favorite biscuit recipe for the pie crust.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the onion, carrots, celery, and garlic (if using) and saute over medium low heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, but not brown, about 10 minutes. If adding mushrooms, raise the heat to medium high and stir in the mushrooms. Saute until mushrooms are softened and any liquid they’ve exuded is evaporated.

Whisk in the flour and cook for a minute, stirring. Mix may be lumpy, but that’s ok. Whisk in 2 cups of the stock and cook, stirring, until sauce is smooth and thickened. Stir in the cream and/or sherry, if using. Taste the sauce and add salt and pepper to taste. Add the peas, if using. Stir in the chicken and the parsley. The filling should be somewhat saucy, not dry or really thick. Add some additional stock or cream if it needs to be thinned a bit.

Assembling the pot pie:

Pour filling into a buttered 2 quart baking dish. Roll out the pie crust and drape it over the filling. Have fun with the edges. Cut a few slits in the crust to let the steam escape during baking. You can do this ahead of time and bake just before serving.

Bake until crust is golden brown and filling is bubbly, about 30-40 minutes. If you assembled the pie ahead of time, bake longer to ensure that everything is hot. Either way, keep an eye on it. If it’s getting brown before it’s getting bubbly, lay a piece of foil on the top. If it’s getting bubbly but not brown, increase the heat to 425 to brown it.

(James Beard’s recipe for “Old-Fashioned Rich Chicken Pie” in James Beard’s American Cookery says to bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes, then at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. You can try it that way if you want. He also brushes the crust with some beaten egg yolk blended with a T of cream. )

Serves 4-6.

Notes:

If you want to substitute biscuit dough for pie crust dough, place biscuits on top the filling instead of crust. Biscuits can be drop biscuits or rolled biscuits.

If you end up with a lot of chicken and veggies and the filling seems to need more sauce, you can also make another cup or two of veloute sauce or bechamel and add it to the filling before assembling the pot pie.

You can make these in individual baking dishes as well.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2012 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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